Rivers of Rodents, Lots of Bots, and Cavalcades of Canines: Crowd Simulation at Pixar Animation Studios

Paul Kanyuk

About the Event

This talk will start with a general presentation of Pixar Animation Studios and our film making process, followed by discussions of our crowd simulation pipeline and the challenges faced on Ratatouille, WALL•E, and Up.

On Ratatouille, an animation centric crowd pipeline
was born, merging the strengths of our proprietary rigging tools and the commercially available software, Massive. WALL•E demanded fast physics for large crowds, for which the technology "Brain Springs" was created. For Up, the focus was flexible navigation and terrain
following for a pack of vicious dogs. Learn how these crowds came to life and how technological improvements helped bring audiences all those Rats, Robots, and Rottweilers!

Biography

Paul Kanyuk is a technical director at Pixar Animation Studios, with credits on the films Cars, Ratatouille, WALL•E, and Up. His specialty is crowd simulation, and he’s responsible for the procedural animation of numerous crowd spectacles, including the hordes of rats in Ratatouille, the deluge of falling passengers in WALL•E, and the vicious pack of dogs in Up. He also teaches courses in RenderMan and crowd simulation at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Kanyuk has a BS Eng. in digital media design from the University of Pennsylvania.